A Singular Woman : The Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mother

Author(s): Janny Scott

Biography/Memoir

A major publishing event: an unprecedented look into the life of the woman who most singularly shaped Barack Obama-his mother. Barack Obama has written extensively about his father, but little is known about Stanley Ann Dunham, the fiercely independent woman who raised him, the person he credits for, as he says, "what is best in me." Here is the missing piece of the story. Award-winning reporter Janny Scott interviewed nearly two hundred of Dunham's friends, colleagues, and relatives (including both her children), and combed through boxes of personal and professional papers, letters to friends, and photo albums, to uncover the full breadth of this woman's inspiring and untraditional life, and to show the remarkable extent to which she shaped the man Obama is today. Dunham's story moves from Kansas and Washington state to Hawaii and Indonesia. It begins in a time when interracial marriage was still a felony in much of the United States, and culminates in the present, with her son as our president- something she never got to see. It is a poignant look at how character is passed from parent to child, and offers insight into how Obama's destiny was created early, by his mother's extraordinary faith in his gifts, and by her unconventional mothering. Finally, it is a heartbreaking story of a woman who died at age fifty-two, before her son would go on to his greatest accomplishments and reflections of what she taught him.

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"Even Obama knew that he had not his extraordinary mother justice. Janny Scott . . . does. She portrays Dunham as a feminist, an utterly independent spirit, a cultural anthropologies, and an international development officer who surely helped shape the internationalist, post-Vietnam-era world view of her son. Scott's book is tirelessly researched, and the sections covering Dunham's life in Indonesia especially are new and valuable to the accumulating biography of Obama's extended global family."
-"The New Yorker"
"An ambitious new biography. . . . Scott pursues a more perplexing and elusive figure than the one Obama pieced together in his own books."
-"The New York Times Book Review"
"The restrained, straight-ahead focus-rather in the spirit, it turns out, of Dunham herself-pays off. By recovering Obama's mother from obscurity, "A Singular Woman" adds in a meaningful way to an understanding of a singular president."
-"Slate" "The key to understanding th

General Fields

  • : 9781594487972
  • : Penguin Putnam Inc
  • : Riverhead Books,U.S.
  • : 0.703
  • : May 2011
  • : 236mm X 163mm X 43mm
  • : United States
  • : August 2011
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Janny Scott
  • : Hardback
  • : 9-Nov
  • : 973.932092
  • : 380
  • : ill